


Half a Day

by Anarhichas



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 14:45:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1189077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarhichas/pseuds/Anarhichas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren sometimes jokes that Armin attracts trouble. He doesn’t know how right he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half a Day

It’s damp, the earlier rain making the streets muddy and air thick. Overcast skies mean that it’s already getting dark, barely hours past noon. Armin’s back and arms ache from the morning’s labours in the fields. He’s glad he is no longer working, but at the same time his stomach cringes at the loss of the withered potato meal he’d have got had he stayed until nightfall. He wonders vaguely whether there will be more food when they finally join the military. It feels like an impossibly long way off. He's too tired to think about it very hard.

He half steps, half jumps between the brown puddles, like playing a confused game of hopscotch. There’s not much point since he is already soaked all over, shoes sopping wet and squelching with every step, but he does it anyway. He can’t feel his toes or fingers. His bony knees shake with the cold. Eyes stare at him and he ignores them.

Armin knows that he shouldn’t be out on the streets alone. He knows Eren and Mikasa, still working, are expecting him to be back in their room with the handful or so other kids, huddled around the fire pit they’d dug into the floor with their bare hands.

He can’t stand the thought.

A dog barks and Armin misses a step, placing his foot right in the middle of a puddle. It splashes up his legs. The mud sucks at his shoe as he stumbles back, right into a man walking behind him.

The man curses and slaps Armin around the head. The flat of his hand is painful and loud against Armin’s wet, lanky hair, and instinctively Armin makes a run for it before the man decide a slap isn’t punishment enough. Barely one minute away and his breath gasps at the small exertion, thighs trembling and feeling as weak as damp tinder. He stops in an alleyway, bent over with the effort to calm his shuddering lungs.

The looming houses make it dark. There’s no one else around.

Armin crouches down in a relatively dry patch. Water still drips onto his back from the eaves high above. He closes his eyes, fingers pressing against the spot where he’d been hit.

He knows he shouldn’t be where he is. There are plenty of people who will do worse than kick him about until they’re satisfied he has nothing worth stealing, after all. Slavers and murderers and rapists, all finding an easy target in a small orphan boy wandering the back streets. He can’t bring himself to go back to relative safety.

Eren and Mikasa are still at the fields because they are strong enough to still be working. Armin had been sent away after falling behind one too many times, noted in the foreman’s book as worth just half a day.

Half a day’s pay is not enough. Half a day’s food is not enough.

Armin is not enough.

It’s an easy enough conclusion to reach, and one he’d found long ago: there is something inadequate about him. Perhaps he is missing some part inside. He knows it from watching himself fail where Eren and Mikasa persevere, when he falls down and hesitates and trembles, and they do not.

It’s why he is in the back alleys, a worthless, weak boy, desperately hungry but unable to do anything about it. It’s why his fingertips jab into the place he’d been slapped and wish that he hadn’t ran away earlier. He deserves whatever he might have been punished with.

He knows if he’s slapped over into the mud, or kicked in the face, or hair pulled out by the fistful, it’s only what he deserves. He knows if he’s too weak to work, too weak to not be left to skulk in the dirty city streets, then he deserves what will come to him because of it. Slavers or murderers or rapists.

He’s only half a day’s worth, after all. He is so very hungry.

Armin crouches and crouches and still no one comes. Eventually it starts to drizzle. His hands are swollen and clumsy as they clutch his wet, threadbare shirt around himself. His thoughts are sluggish. He tries to imagine the land in his old book where it was always summer and winter at the same time, heat and rain every day to make the plants grow massive. The green images in mind’s eye refuse and he is left instead with the honesty of brown surroundings, turning grey in the growing dark.

Still no one comes. He has to return or else Eren and Mikasa will get back and find him missing. There is just a little time yet, he knows.

Using a fingertip Armin draws the outline of a tree in the mud in front of him: trunk and thin branches and a big, bushy crown. It is painstakingly done, a careful and long work. His ungainly hands make it messy anyway, too inadequate to exist, so he wipes it away with one foot as he stands to leave.


End file.
